John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

“Talked?” John Junior caught her eye. “That girl didn’t talk, she screamed. Mom, she screamed all the time. And when she didn’t have something she could hurt you with, hey. She’s got her pants down.”

Paul stood up, his chair clattering backwards.

“JJ, come on,” Chris said. “You know you got all that from Pop.”

“Well Pop is right . Mom, you know what he told me, out at the Refugee Center? He said, ‘Your mother’s not the easiest person in the world to live with.’ Hey. You know he’s talking about Maria Elena.”

Barb was aware of her middle child, his white sleeves aglow. But she couldn’t take her eyes off John Junior.

“Yeah, Pop tells me things. You can’t keep him under your thumb all the time. The day after that girl came to our house, he pulled me aside and he told me to make sure the twins were never alone with her. Good call.”

The mother had intended the Magic Kingdom, but the girl saw Gotham City. The first morning Maria Elena woke up in the Lulucita house, she’d crawled into the master bathroom while Jay was shaving and, after checking his befuddled grin, flipped his thick penis out of his boxers and kissed it. The father had lost control of the razor, slashing a half-circle across his cheek. His bellowing set Dora and Sylvia running for the stairs, forgetting even the cat; thank God John Junior had stopped them. Then after the father had banged back into the bedroom, bleeding, accusing, the little refugee had come after him with the scissors Barb used to trim the children’s hair.

Had the girl been feeling scorned? Maria Elena had worse secrets than Silky Kahlberg. She shrieked in languages no one knew.

“Mom told us to stay away too,” Chris was saying. “Like, Mom the same as Pop, JJ. She realized that we weren’t equipped to deal, just ordinary American kids.”

“Okay, but how long did it take? How many incidents?”

How long had it gone on? Had it really taken Barbara ten days to concede that for Maria Elena, home and family would always seethe, cutthroat, bloody? When Jehovah’s Witnesses came to the door, Barb had been down in the laundry room, and by the time she’d rushed upstairs there were copies of The Watchtower scattered across her stoop and her camellias. Two women in white gloves hustled away, screeching promises of hellfire while, cackling spread-legged in the open doorway, Maria Elena masturbated with the remote for the front room’s stereo. Just getting the girl inside left Barbara with a serious black eye. The bruise took longer to disappear than the scar she’d gotten from the bathroom scissors.

She and her husband managed to protect the twins from excesses like that — she and her husband and JJ and Chris, the full security team. But twice during the brief adoption Dora and Sylvia watched this older child squat on one of the better rugs in the house and drop a quick twist of shit, a demon challenge to her step-sisters. During dinner another day Maria Elena had fondled both the older boys at once, dipping in her chair to extend her reach, so that the only thing the others could see above the tabletop were her feral eyes. She’d muttered the English words she knew best, the filthiest in the language, and JJ had startled away, whipping up a full plate and breaking it across her head. In response Maria Elena, her pockmarked face like a sea-creature’s draped with weeds and clams, had bared her gap-full shark-like teeth in prolonged malevolent laughter, interspersed with more of her badlands jabber. Finally she’d come up with a bit of un-obscene English: You don wan it? You liars. Liars. What you got all those fine big soft beds for upstairs if you don wan it?

“How many times,” JJ went on, “does she have to pull down her pants or hold a knife to somebody’s neck?”

“I can’t, I can’t,” Paul said. “In-n-need to get out, get out of here…”

“Mom, really. Pop called it. He told me, ‘This family is going to be dealing with the damage she did for a long time.’”

Paul was trying to find a way out of the circle of chairs, but Barb kept her eyes on John Junior until she caught a whiff of the younger boy’s sweat. She’d come to know it so well, her middle child’s sweat; she could pick it out even in this dusty sauna. In a moment she too was on her feet, her arm around Paul. He had her mother’s body, Barb recalled: the light bones of a family that sculpted shells.

“Mr. Paul,” she said. “Big guy. You need a break?”

The boy slumped into her embrace, and she was stung to think how much she’d talked about the girl as he’d sat listening. How could she have let it go on so long?

“Sure you can have a break,” she said. “Paulie, sure. Let’s get you some air.”

She glanced at the others, keeping them in their seats, and the sight brought back the notion that she’d wound up raising an abused child after all. After Connecticut Children’s Services had taken the Mexican girl away — well, what would you call this boy’s daily getup, the black and white, if not obsessive compulsive?

The mother felt relieved about getting out of the museum’s upstairs closet. Relieved for herself, as well as for Paul: to step back into the gallery felt like going to the beach. Paul noticed the air too, his curly hair shifting against her breast, and Barbara left the door open for the others. The last thing she needed was one of them getting dizzy. She still had a dirty job to do.

Checking round the gallery, the first person she noticed was the NATO trooper. The Lieutenant Major must’ve figured he needed extra security, though just now the liaison was dawdling over the tomb jewelry, without so much as a glance at the mother and boy. The guy with the semi-automatic, left to his own devices, was trying out his English on Romy. To see the gypsy chatting across the bright room in an outfit that was, after all, only what all the girls were wearing — you could tell at once she was no Maria Elena.

When Umberto approached her, the mother’s determination resurged, blackly. Silky didn’t even bother to look, he sent his flunky, and once again she was sick of living this way. Had it up to here with this double dealer and the husband who played along.

Meantime her middle child pulled away. Paul regained his composure, smoothing his shirtfront. “I guess I j-just need to use the bathroom,” he said.

“Seruizio?” asked the Neapolitan. “Bagno?”

“Really?” Barbara asked. “That’s all, Mr. Paul?”

“It’s oh, oh, okay. And you can, you can g-go ahead a talk about, about wh-wh-whatever you need to, in there.”

Behind the boy, a staring contest got underway. The loaded looks were limited this time to Umberto and the Lieutenant Major, a call and response. Barb couldn’t miss it, but she kept her own eyes on her boy. She gave his collar a straightening.

“It’s okay , Mama. It’s, it’s ancient hist, history.”

“I don’t know how I let it go on so long.”

“Talking, like, talking, that’s p-part of the, the, the p-process.” He’d worked one hand into a pocket, the knuckles visible under the cloth. “Everyb-body’s got to find their o, own way to m-m-m… we’ve all got to find a way to m-move on.”

He’d picked up a few catch-phrases himself, during his therapy after the girl had been taken away. Not that Barbara could see any reason not to believe what the boy had to say. And meanwhile Umberto’s smile hadn’t improved any, and the liaison officer’s nod was more of the same, a Power Nod. Mother of God, was she sick of these shadow soldiers and their antique charade.

So she let Paul go, once more accompanied by a bureaucrat in a blazer.

Back in Bridgeport, of course, he would’ve been heading for therapy. The man at Paul’s elbow would’ve been one of the people with Children’s Services.